The quarrelsome tone that hangs over the debates on the
teaching of literature can often be traced back to the advent of contemporary
literary theory. This is certainly not surprising. Whenever new approaches or
techniques are being advocated, a very understandable ill-humor overcomes those
who feel they may have to modify or to reconsider well-established pedagogical
habits that served them well until the most recent troublemakers came along.
But the polemical response in the case of contemporary theory, and especially
of some of its aspects, runs deeper. It feeds not only on civilized
conservatism but on moral indignation. It speaks with an anxiety that is not
only that of a disturbed tranquility but of a disturbed moral conscience. Nor
is this mood confined to the opponents of theory. Its protagonists, in most
cases, are just as nervous. When they appear not to be, their self-assurance
often seems to be dependent on utopian schemes.
The well-established rationale for the professing of
literature has come under fire. Small wonder that it chooses to shoot back. Ever
since the teaching of literature became an autonomous academic field (and we
are frequently reminded that this is a fairly recent development, going back no
further than the late nineteenth century) it has justified itself as a humanistic
and historical discipline, allied to yet distinct from the descriptive sciences
of philology and rhetoric. Its ambitions, however, go beyond mere description. It
not only has its own national and comparative history but, since it deals with
a relatively stable canon of specific texts, it should be a model for the other
historical sciences whose subject matter is less clearly defined. Moreover, it
has the task of determining the meaning of texts and this hermeneutic function
establishes its kinship with theology. Finally, as a depositor of human
experience of considerable variety and scope, it gains access to questions of
moral philosophy - questions of value and of normative judgment. Its technical
and descriptive aspects as a science of language dovetail with its historical,
theological and ethical function. The professor of literature has good reasons
to feel appeased; his scientific conscience is satisfied by the positive rigor
of his linguistic and historical knowledge, while his moral, political and (in
the extensive sense) religious conscience is assuaged by the application of
this knowledge to the understanding of the world, of society and of the self.
The didactics of literature could legitimately hope to be exemplary for interdisciplinary
humanistic studies.
Neither is this hope incompatible with literary theory and
literary criticism: some forms of theory, especially those which continue a
tradition of aesthetic speculation that, in the field of English, can be traced
back to Coleridge, fully confirm these expectations. This would be the case for
such diverse names as those of I. A. Richards, Lionel Trilling, R. P. Blackmur
and Northrop Frye. It would, however, not be quite the same for William Empson
or for Kenneth Burke, or, more recently, for some, predominantly French,
critics and philosophers whose work takes into account investigations pursued
in the field of structural linguistics and who have kindled the ire of their
humanistic colleagues. Thus, in an influential article published in the Harvard
alumni bulletin, Harvard Magazine, September-October 1982, the Distinguished
Professor of English Literature, Walter Jackson Bate, author of outstanding
books on Keats, Samuel Johnson and the intellectual history of romanticism,
denounced the bankruptcy of literary studies. Their increased professionalism
and specialization have failed, he claims, to rescue the humanities at a time
when they are said to be ''in the weakest state they ever suffered- bent on a
self-destructive course, through a combination of anger, fear and purblind
defensiveness.'' In a historical overview that traces the gradual decay of
literary teaching, Bate sees the increasing concentration on literary theory as
the main cause for this decline. It culminates in the final catastrophe of the
post-structural era, the invasion of departments of English by French
influences that advocate "a nihilistic view of literature, of human
communication, and of life itself.''
The main culprit, denounced by name, is Jacques Derrida,
said to be a "puckish Parisian" (he is neither), "who never
turns to the really major philosophers except to snatch at stale
pessimisms" (e.g., Nietzsche). The remark suggests that Professor Bate, a
careful scholar and brilliant teacher, has this time confined his sources of
information to Newsweek magazine. The crisis in the teaching of literature to
which Bate alerts us is genuine enough. This does not mean, however, that his
diagnosis or his remedies are valid, even less so since these remedies do not
take the form of a reasoned discussion but of an appeal to the administrative
officers of the universities to deny tenure to teachers who concentrate on
theory. The question to Bate's mind is not even in need of discussion. For all
people of good will and good sense, the matter has long since been settled once
and for all. What is left is a matter of law-enforcement rather than a critical
debate. One must be feeling very threatened indeed to become so aggressively
defensive. My own awareness of the critical, even subversive, power of literary
instruction does not stem from philosophical allegiances but from a very
specific teaching experience. In the 1950s, Bate's colleague at Harvard, Reuben
Brower, taught an undergraduate course in General Education entitled "The
Interpretation of Literature" (better known on the Harvard campus and in
the profession at large as HUM 6) in which many graduate students in English
and Comparative Literature served as teaching assistants. No one could be more
remote from high-powered French theory than Reuben Brower. He wrote books on
Shakespeare and on Pope that are models of sensitive scholarship but not
exactly manifestos for critical terrorism. He was much more interested in Greek
and Latin literature than in literary theory. The critics he felt closest to,
besides Eliot, were Richards and Lea vis, and in both of them he was in
sympathy with their emphasis on ethics. Brower, however, believed in and
effectively conveyed what appears to be an entirely innocuous and pragmatic
precept, founded on Richards's "practical criticism." Students, as
they began to write on the writings of others, were not to say anything that
was not derived from the text they were considering.
They were not to make any statements that they could not
support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text. They
were asked, in other words, to begin by reading texts closely as texts and not
to move at once into the general context of human experience or history. Much
more humbly or modestly, they were to start out from the bafflement that such
singular turns of tone, phrase, and figure were bound to produce in readers
attentive enough to notice them and honest enough not to hide their
non-understanding behind the screen of received ideas that often passes, in
literary instruction, for humanistic knowledge. This very simple rule,
surprisingly enough, had far-reaching didactic consequences. I have never known
a course by which students were so transformed. Some never saw the point of
thus restricting their attention to the matter at hand and of concentrating on
the way meaning is conveyed rather than on the meaning itself. Others, however,
caught on very quickly and, henceforth, they would never be the same. The
papers they handed in at the end of the course bore little resemblance to what
they produced at the beginning. What they lost in generality, they more than
made up for in precision and in the closer proximity of their writing to the
original mode. It did not make writing easier for them for they no longer felt
free to indulge in any thought that came into their head or to paraphrase any
idea they happened to encounter. The profession is littered with the books that
the students of Reuben Brower failed to write. Good readers often are spare
writers and in the present state of literary studies, that is all to the good.
Here was a course, then, utterly devoid of subversive
intentions as well as of theoretical objections. The conceptual and
terminological apparatus was kept to a minimum, with only a few ordinary
language terms for metalanguage. The entire stance was certainly not devoid of
its own ideological and methodological assumptions, yet they managed to remain
implicit without interfering with the procedures. Reuben Brower had a rare
talent, not out of respect for the delicacy of language, for keeping things as
tidy as a philosophical investigation ought to be yet, at the same time,
entirely pragmatic. Mere reading, it turns out, prior to any theory, is able to
transform critical discourse in a manner that would appear deeply subversive to
those who think of the teaching of literature as a substitute for the teaching
of theology, ethics, psychology, or intellectual history. Close reading
accomplishes this often in spite of itself because it cannot fail to respond to
structures of language which it is the more or less secret aim of literary
teaching to keep hidden. Attention to the philological or rhetorical devices of
language is not the same as aesthetic appreciation, although the latter can be
a way of access to the former. Perhaps the most difficult thing for students
and teachers of literature to realize is that their appreciation is measured by
the analytical rigor of their own discourse about literature, a criterion that
is not primarily or exclusively aesthetic. Yet it separates the sheep from the
goats, the consumers from the professors of literature, the chit-chat of
evaluation from actual perception. The personal experience of Reuben Brower's
Humanities 6 was not so different from the impact of theory on the teaching of
literature over the past ten or fifteen years. The motives may have been more
revolutionary and the terminology was certainly more intimidating. But, in
practice, the tum to theory occurred as a return to philology, to an
examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces.
This is so even among the most controversial French theoreticians.
Foucault's first major book, Les mots et les chases, as its title indicates,
has to do with the referential relationship between language and reality, but
it approaches the question not in terms of philosophical speculation but, much
more pragmatically, as it appears in the methodological innovations of social
scientists and philologists. Whereas Derrida's starting point, though more traditionally
"philosophical" in appearance, stresses the empirical powers of language
over those of intuition and knowledge. His critique of phenomenology in the
name of linguistics, by way of Husserl and Saussure, bears this out. Even in
the case of Nietzsche, a frequent point of reference for all these writers, the
accent falls on Nietzsche the philologist rather than on Nietzsche the
existential nihilist. Why, then, the cries of doom and the appeals to
mobilization against a common enemy? It appears that the return to philology,
whether it occurs casually or as a consequence of highly self-conscious,
philosophical mutations, upsets the taken-for-granted assumptions with which
the profession of literature has been operating. As a result, the attribution
of a reliable, or even exemplary, cognitive and, by extension, ethical function
to literature indeed becomes much more difficult.
But this is a recurrent philosophical quandary that has
never been resolved. The latest version of the question, which still determines
our present-day convictions about the aims of literature, goes back to the rise
of aesthetics as an independent discipline in the later half of the eighteenth
century. The link between literature (as art), epistemology, and ethics is the
burden of aesthetic theory at least since Kant. It is because we teach
literature as an aesthetic function that we can move so easily from literature
to its apparent prolongations in the spheres of self-knowledge, of religion,
and of politics. In its origin and its development, aesthetics has been the
province of philosophers of nature and of the self rather than of philosophers
of language. Neither has aesthetic theory succeeded in its admirable ambition
to unite cognition, desire and morality in one single synthetic judgment.
Professor Bate, in the article mentioned before, asserts as a matter of course
that it suffices to "tum to Kant" to lay to rest a linguistically
motivated skepticism like that of David Hume. He echoes a generally admitted
position among professors of literature rather than among professors of
philosophy. Whether a reading of The Critique of Judgment, as distinct from its
simplified versions in Schiller and his offspring, would confirm this assertion
certainly stands in need of careful examination. Contemporary literary theory
has started this long overdue process. Literary theory raises the unavoidable
question whether aesthetic values can be compatible with the linguistic structures
that make up the entities from which these values are derived. Such questions
never ceased to haunt the consciousness of writers and philosophers. They come
to the fore in the ambivalent rejection of rhetoric at the very moment that it
was being used and refined as never before, or in the assimilation of the
considerable aesthetic charge emanating from rhetorical tropes to the aesthetic
neutrality of grammar. It is by no means an established fact that aesthetic
values and linguistic structures are incompatible. What is established is that
their compatibility, or lack of it, has to remain an open question and that the
manner in which the teaching of literature, since its beginning in the later
nineteenth century, has foreclosed the question is unsound, even if motivated
by the best of intentions.
What also ought to be (but is not) established is that the
professing of literature ought to take place under the aegis of this question. From
a purely methodological point of view, this would not be difficult to achieve.
It would involve a change by which literature, instead of being taught only as
a historical and humanistic subject, should be taught as a rhetoric and a
poetics prior to being taught as a hermeneutics and a history. The
institutional resistances to such a move, however, are probably insurmountable.
For one thing, it changes departments of English from being large organizations
in the service of everything except their own subject matter into much smaller
units, dedicated to the professional specialization that Professor Bate
deplores. It also requires a change in the rationale for the teaching of
literature, away from standards of cultural excellence that, in the last
analysis, are always based on some form of religious faith, to a principle of
disbelief that is not so much scientific as it is critical, in the full
philosophical sense of the term. One sees
Source: Resistance to Theory - Paul de Man (1986)
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